Meillassoux, Part Deux (or Dieu?)

Anyone who knows me understands that Quentin Meillassoux’s somewhat bizzaro rise to philosophical fame remains my singularly important academic interest. He captured our speculative hearts with After Finitude, and then dashed our collective hopes with the qualitatively insane excerpts from The Divine Inexistence… or so goes the dominant narrative. Anyway, his newest work, The Number and the Siren, has been recently translated and is available from Urbanomic, and it features a reading of French poet Stephane Mallarme’s Un Coup de Des (A Throw of the Dice…), and how the latter is basically a one-upping of Jesus and the entire Christian project. Wait, what? Here’s a snippet of Adam Kotsko’s ridiculously awesome review:

Yet in light of The Number and the Siren, I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that Meillassoux is embracing or appropriating Christianity. What he’s really trying to do is much bolder and, one might say, more insane: He wants to do Christianity one better. He wants to create something more powerful than Christianity, something that would radicalize Christianity’s wildest hopes — and that would deliver, insofar as it’s based on the radical contingency of the universe rather than on the illusion of a transcendent God.